Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Spring4D roadmap

Ok, actually less of a roadmap but more of some news regarding the project - but I thought with the recently published Delphi roadmap for this year this might be a good title. ;)

What has been done?

Spring4D has been moved to BitBucket some while ago as most of you know - for those that do not this is a reminder as the project on Google Code will not be continued. If anyone knows a nice way of redirecting from there to the new page let me know. While we did this we also changed from svn to git which made it much easier to work than with svn - except a few times when git was a bit confusing if you never worked with it before. I will share a few things on that in another post.

In the past few months we made some nice changes and cleaned up the source. The collection types have been improved and I am certain we found a good balance between complexity and usability. I hope they will be used by other projects to have one accepted collection libary (apart from the RTL ones) in order to be compatible between these projects (think of an ORM library that uses the same collection types as the MVVM or binding framework for example).

Also Honza Rameš and Jeroen Pluimers have been busy on making Spring4D ready for OSX, iOS and Android. These changes are currently still in an extra branch but if you are interested in using the library on these platforms check them out.

The are also some nice additions to the dependency injection container which I will talk about in detail in another post.

We are now down to fixing bugs that we (or you) find - please feel free to report them in the issue tracker. During that time we will also improve source documentation and write guides on how to use Spring4D. Our plan is to finally (the project turns 5 this year, can you imagine) officially release a version 1.0 by the end of march.

What's next?

After the release some work on DSharp will be done removing the redundancies (like the collection types and the multicast events) and it will be then using Spring4D.Base.

Some things that we are planning to add to Spring4D this year are:

- adding more collection types

- improving the RTTI extensions

- adding some utility types (like Weak<T>)

- adding expression types (similar to those from DSharp)

- improving the dependency injection container

While we want to add features Spring4D will still focus on some core features and leave things like GUI or database things for other projects. If you have suggestions or want to contribute in any way feel free to contact us. You are also welcome to discuss or ask things in the Spring4D google group. We are also eager to hear from you if you are using Spring4D in your projects.